


That's the Time it Would Take to Fix My Heart

by becauseitrhymes



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Blind Louis, Fluff, Fluffy, Fluffy Boys, M/M, Maybe don't know it just yet, Religious Content, Supportive Harry, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, You've been warned, blind!louis, self indulgent, they are in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 18:59:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14677413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/becauseitrhymes/pseuds/becauseitrhymes
Summary: Louis has his eyes open as Harry moves to search for him, and as he moves Louis reaches to meet him. He knows that where they lay, a place in which he has spent so many days, looks the best at this time.“The sky is a bit cloudy tonight,” Harry says, and then he adds on in a murmur, “I’m looking at you.”Louis closes his eyes but turns his head to the left and tilts his head up. The cold is intrusive as it prickles itself into his skin- it’s the sort of cold that makes him wonder what it feels like to be warm.Harry brushes his hand against Louis’ neck and turns his head closer towards his own. When he kisses him, it’s as soft as it always is; it’s barely a taste, a fleeting movement of lips. In this moment, everything is wonderful.Alternatively, I wrote this last year and it's short as anything but it's incredibly self indulgent and soft and, promise on this one, worth the five minutes it'll take to read it. Louis is blind, Harry is his best friend, there's poetry everywhere and they're always going to be in love.





	That's the Time it Would Take to Fix My Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for deciding to read this. It is short but I worked quite hard on the wording and I think I'm pretty proud of it. 
> 
> If you're here, I adore you.
> 
> I will extend this and make it into something real if people think I should. I think I'd like to, and I probably will as soon as literally anyone asks me to (I need validation constantly).

Within the church, the silence is stifling.

Every hour, the bells chime, and there’s the occasional sequence of footfalls, before everything stops again. He sits to the left of his mother, as she asks, like every other day, for what can’t be brought back.

There’s no movement except the rise and fall of chests and impatient fingers tapping on thighs.

She stops whispering, and he can hear her hands drop. As his mother turns to the left, her clothes seem to whisper.

“I don’t think you’re trying,” she notes, and she places her hand on his chin to lift it to her direction. He pulls away. “Louis. _Please_.”

Louis lowers his head again. His feels like he might start swaying, and there’s a thick kind of pressure in his chest. The healing scar on his right arm tingles, as if it’s teasing him.

“It won’t do anything, mum. No one is listening to you.” Louis closes his eyes. “Clearly they never listened to me.”

He finds himself lost in a place like this; relying on sounds to know what is going on around him makes him only more hopeless. When Louis sits for so long in silence he only feels like coals in a fire that’s burning out, and he can’t control it. His mother thinks she will get Him to heal him if she asks kindly enough, but even _before,_ if he spent his whole life trying to work in the favour of _god_ only to end up like this, he only holds doubts in his mind about a presence that works for everyone.

As a child, Louis believed in magic. He believed that everything that happened was happening for a reason; he thought he had control. In this magic, he put everything he wanted into it and thought that his faith would get him there.

Now, he knows that was never true- he’s been stamping his dreams into the sky and he’s never going to get them back.

 

           

            _Before_

Harry grasps Louis’s wrist as he tips back on the bed, and laughs when Louis scrambles away.

“And to think that _I’m_ the best friend you have.” He opens his bag and pulls out a paperback copy of _The Catcher in the Rye_ , doesn’t put away the jumper that falls out with it. “You must be miserable.”

Louis shakes his head and takes his sunglasses off his head, sitting them on the side table and dropping to his knees. As he rummages through the clutter under his bed blindly, he looks up at Harry.

“I’m not giving you my notes on this, mate.” When he comes back up, he has the same paperback in his hand.

Louis quiets Harry every time he begins to speak and gets through a quarter of the book before setting it down. He looks to the window as the streetlights flicker. Each night they spotlight the bush next to the driveway; Louis can recall when his dad would teach him the constellations as a child under that spotlight, and how his mother would call it their very own stage.

With a vague smile, he glances towards Harry’s book. It’s upside down.

“You’re terrible,” He grins as he stands. “Tea?”

Harry jumps off the bed and knocks his feet against the table. “’Course, Lou.”

He doesn’t turn around as Louis’s sunglasses clatter to the hardwood floors.

 

_Now_

Dinner is consistently exhausting.

Before, when things were better, he loved watching his sisters faces while they laughed at their dad’s jokes, and when Harry would sit across from him they would kick each other’s feet under the table while glancing at each other with grins.

He finds himself now trying so hard to keep from breaking down every time his cutlery misses the plate, makes himself close his eyes when Harry takes his wrist and guides his hand. When his mother tries to make conversation, he wants to scream. Things will never be like before.

“I saw a shirt that would look lovely on you this morning, Louis,” She touches his shoulder, and he shrugs off her hand.

“I can’t see myself, mum, why would I care about how I look?”

Harry knocks his elbow into his side. Louis sighs, relenting _,_ but he doesn’t look up to his mother. The headache that’s been wrapping around his skull since morning clings to him like a lover that never eases off.

No one fights the familiar silence that settles. Between them is a wearing cat’s cradle of things they’ll never be able to say without breaking, but at the same time Louis feels threadbare- he feels as if they’re all looking at him all the time, and there’s not a thing he can do about it.

 

It was warm the night it happened. Louis can’t say that he remembers all of it happening. _Trauma,_ the doctors had told him, _tends to lead your brain to block out certain images and feelings._

What Louis can recall now happened in a series of snapshots. There was red, and there was crying behind him, and he could hear glass shattering as he looked for the last time at his sister’s hair; he’ll never forget that fading streak of blue she’d insisted on having being tinged with scarlet. He remembers that the sky wasn’t clear, and as he looks back he wishes it were.

He could hear the people he loved talking while they thought he was still unconscious. Harry had been crying, and his mother sounded desperate as she asked for the doctors to help him.

_The glass hit his arms, chest and face,_ they’d murmured, _and cut into his eyes severely. I’m sorry, ma’am, he won’t see again._

 

_Now_

 

Louis has his eyes open as Harry moves to search for him, and as he moves Louis reaches to meet him. As his arm moves over the grass it picks up the cold’s dampness. He knows that where they lay, a place in which he has spent so many days, looks the best at this time.

“The sky is a bit cloudy tonight,” Harry says, and then he adds on in a murmur, “I’m looking at you.”

Louis closes his eyes but turns his head to the left and tilts his head up. The cold is intrusive as it prickles itself into his skin- it’s the sort of cold that makes him wonder what it feels like to be warm.

Harry brushes his hand against Louis’ neck and turns his head closer towards his own. When he kisses him, it’s as soft as it always is; it’s barely a taste, a fleeting movement of lips.

They haven’t talked about what they are. Maybe they never will. All that matters to Louis is that they both know there’s a love there that’s stronger than anything either of them could have imagined.

“Where’s the moon?”

Harry touches his cheek and turns his face to the right. “If you opened your eyes you’d be looking at it through the clouds. It’s small tonight; As big as a fingernail, I’d say.”

It makes Louis smile. When the moon is small the yard is always dark; The tiny spots of light in the corners of his sight must mean the yard has been steeped in an artificial yellow from the lights above the back door.

They don’t say anything for a moment. The trees and the muffled yelling of the neighbours break up the silence, but they let what there is of it drench them from head to toe and keep them safe. The light in the corner of Louis’s eye is so indistinct that he can’t see it unless he focuses on it. For once, he finds himself not minding.

“And the stars?” Louis makes his voice softer so he doesn’t disturb the peace that’s settled. “Is there a lot?”

Harry’s laugh is quiet. “I’d wouldn’t have dragged you out if there wasn’t a lot, Louis.”

Louis doesn’t have to see to know he’s smiling. “Are they gold?”

Harry’s arm twists out of his grip as he moves closer, and he wraps it around Louis’s neck. His warm skin is comforting.

“They always are.”


End file.
